The major
male dominated monotheistic religions Judaism, Christianity and Islam
have had a profound effect on women's lives up to and including the
present day.

Sexism, meaning the degrading of women to second class status is
rooted in these religions. Woman was supposedly created as an
afterthought from Adam's rib. Her role established in the scriptures as
temptress, whore, foot-washer and domestic servant, unclean during
menstruation and untouchable until ritual cleansing after childbirth.

The religions themselves practice overt discrimination against women
within their own institutions. They are run by men for men. Christianity
has it's female icon, Mary, in the lower ranks where their services are
needed women are tolerated within a supposedly celibate environment, to
help the male hierarchy and in the past Convents provided
'accommodation' for upper class women away from the hubbub of secular
life. It also needs them to perform primary indoctrination for young
children and run services that bind people to the church at local level.

Latterly as the difficulty of recruiting enough men to fill the posts
of clergy, some religions have bowed to pressure from religious women
who want to become priests, but their attitudes to women still prevent
many women from having freedom of choice and opportunity.

The rules of religion enshrined in law, affect women's lives even the
lives of those who do not subscribe to those beliefs. Limiting a woman's
right to control her own fertility, her sexual activity, and economic
independence prevents her ability to exercise freedom of choice.

Birth Control and Abortion

Healthy family life depends upon the right to choose the number of
children that can be supported, by the parents in the environment and
conditions in which they live.

The Catholic Church seeks to prevent effective contraception and its
policy of banning abortion takes a woman's control over her own body out
of her own hands. Even now in Britain decisions are, in the last resort,
in the hands of doctors, and where Catholic ideology influences local
decisions, facilities are restricted. Catholic doctrine does not only
apply to, or affect Catholic women, but all women in countries that bow
to the influence of Catholics. The Vatican and Evangelical Christians
also pressure the UN, preventing the funding of health and population
control programmes in developing countries where they include
contraception and abortion facilities.

Catholic determination to prevent the need for contraception and
abortion, leads them to oppose the availability of full and objective
information on sexual activity, contraceptive methods, and pregnancy
counselling.

They have the misguided and patronising attitude that if women and
girls are denied information the problem will go away. They think that
the threat of pregnancy will deter women from unprotected sexual
intercourse in the first place, and that in the event of unwanted
pregnancy independent unbiased counselling about their options will
automatically lead to abortion. This leads to all the evils associated
with unprotected sex and unwanted pregnancy.

Catholics are at the forefront of a continuing battle against
women's rights to choose early safetermination of unwanted
pregnancies. In the past thousands if not millions of women have died
from late, or septic abortions and multiple pregnancies.

The attitudes to sex - that sex outside marriage, for pleasure and
not for procreation, is sinful, strongly affects sex education policy
and contributes to the ignorance of sexual matters that leads to a high
rate of teen-age pregnancy, ill health and infertility in women by
causing tubal infection.

It has led to guilt and repression over bodily functions and sexual
activity. Attitudes that have blighted the lives of both men and women,
and the genital mutilation of young women is one of the most abhorrent
results of perverted superstitious sexual abuse still practiced.

Women on every continent have suffered massive unnecessary
gynaecological disease from STDs because of the Catholic Church's ban on
barrier methods of contraception which would have afforded them
protection.

In Catholic Ireland, surgical techniques were devised to enable women
to bear children when this had proved hazardous, it's intention to
prevent them from resorting to contraception. These treatments caused
lifelong pain and disablement to many women. This practice is only now
coming out into the open as some of them seek compensation from these
supposedly government sanctioned treatments.

The pressures on women have caused not only physical health problems,
but mental ill health, psychological trauma and neurosis, through the
stress and anxiety of personal guilt, low self esteem and family
breakdown.

Population
Control, Poverty and HIV/AIDS

Population Control, Poverty and
HIV/AIDS

Men, women and children in their thousands are dying too because of
the prevention of population control programmes. Women deplete their own
health by having babies which die from starvation. People in developing
countries, faced with hostile climatic change and the pressures of
global capitalism, are unable to provide themselves with food and fuel,
and are driven to denude the land, in vicious circle of poverty and
starvation.

Millions of women and their children have died and are dying now from
Sexually Transmitted Diseases in the developing world, now most notably
in the pandemic of HIV/AIDS. Superstitions regarding the curative powers
of having sex with virgins among some African men, and the Roman
Catholic campaign to prevent the use of condoms, on the ground in
individual countries and through the UN funded health programmes has
continued significantly to the spread of HIV/AIDS.

US hostility to China, much of it based on its resistance to
Christian missionary activity which they consider subversive), as well
as their ideological opposition communism, does not recognise the value
of it's serious attempts to limit population growth and its attempts to
prevent the traditional attitudes that lead to the killing of girl
babies. Global capitalism sees China as one huge potential market and
appears to care little for the ecological price to be paid for the
exploitation of that potential.

Elitism
Education and Exclusion

Elitism Education and Exclusion

Until recent times women were excluded from other than primary
education. Higher education, the professions, and decision making
institutions were until a mere hundred years or so, closed to them. Imagine
how much more advanced education, literature, medicine, science would
have been had not half the population not been excluded! How much
more balanced would have been the progress had not so much effort been
expended in glorifying god, and fighting wars which must be at least
partly explained by male domination, and more spent on health, education
and welfare for everyone.

The purpose of education was seen by the religions initially as for
religious purposes, not secular ones, and promotion of religious belief
is still central to their mission. In Muslim countries children are
taught to know the Koran by heart. In religious schools in the UK
children are schooled in their religions, taught their religion's
version of history and ideology. Their attitudes to women's place in the
world, and what is expected of them is high on their list of objectives.
One of the major objections now being recognised by ethnic minority
activists in the UK is the extent to which segregation of their children
into sectarian schools, subordinates them to their conservative
'leaders'. Women and girls in particular are pressured to accept aspects
of their religious culture that they find oppressive, as do many
Catholic women and girls. Separation from the wider community of other
women and girls, means that they are less able to assert their own
ideas.

The academic elitism, demeans the less clever and considers
them and their effort as of lesser worth than those of men. The supposed
inferiority of the uneducated leads to notions of supremacy, racism and
xenophobia. And women's lowly role was and is maintained by refusing
them education and further reinforced by denying them employment outside
the home. It also affects attitudes to their services as carers and
nurturers within the home and family.

Women
and Work

Women and Work

The traditional conservative religious view of the role of women as
being within the home, serving the needs of their men, looking after the
children, doing the chores, and not as individuals with rights and
aspirations of their own outside this arena has seriously limited
women's lives.

They have not been regarded as of equal intellectual or creative
status as men, nor deserving of any right to expect any other roles in
life, much to the detriment of the professions, arts and development of
science.

It has resulted in the assumption that work traditionally done by
women for free, should be done for free, or if pay is necessary,
it should be as little as possible. So child care, cooking, cleaning,
waiting, nursing etc. remain poorly valued and low paid and remain so.
An extension of this is the assumption that cooking, sewing, and many
creative activities done by women are domestic and recreational, when
done by men are elevated to 'serious activity' - chefs, tailors, poets,
painters and potters! Hence the apparent paucity of women in 'top' jobs
or 'top' artists, regardless of the time taken out by childbearing and
domestic chores done for the rest of the family by most women.

Employment outside the home is still severely curtailed in
some Muslim countries, but even in 2002 Britain women are still unable
to attain equal treatment, promotion and pay in the workplace. There are
still many people men and women who think that a woman's place is at
home looking after her husband and 2.4 children. Despite considerable
pressure from intelligent, educated women, and the men who support their
cause, the problems associated with getting men to take on their fair
share of child care, part time working, and domestic responsibilities
still present insurmountable obstacles for many women.

Crime
and Punishment

Crime and Punishment

Another area in which women have suffered at the hands of religion is
in the field of punishment, The punitive attitudes of the 'upright
conservative Christian' ethos have shaped our penal system at all
levels, regardless of the occasional penal reformers who may have also
been Christians.

Specifically, women are punished for offending against religious
sexual mores: rules that apply to women but not to men, and which are
used as an excuse for institutionalised violence against women. Prostitution
is a typical example of punitive attitudes to women but not to their
clients. Driven underground by these attitudes and the law that results
from them, and into the hands of pimps and organised crime, prostitution
becomes a sleazy, exploitative business, riddled with guilt, drugs,
disease and violence. If it were regulated and the women treated as sex
workers, an essential part of the lives of many people it would be
stripped of most of the worst aspects of its current practice.

The implementation of 'justice' and 'punishment' for criminal
activity impinges more harshly on women than on men. Partly because it
is overwhelmingly implemented my men. People who choose to mete out
'justice' and those who choose to work in the field of implementing
punishment (and they are mostly men), are rarely the sort of people who
consider or care about the effect their judgements have on families,
effects that traumatise children and have effects long into the future.

Not only are women more harshly treated when they fall foul of the
law themselves because of the offence caused by women who dare to offend
against their stereotypes, but as the dependants of male offenders they
and their children are more likely to suffer as a result of harsh penal
policy.

Because women have different strategies in dealing with abuse from
men who can rely on their superior strength they often do not receive
the benefit of the sympathy given to the spontaneous violent crime born
of anger.

Homo
Homosexuality

Homosexuality

The roots of prejudice against homosexual people has its origins in
the religions which insist against all reason that it is 'sinful'.
Persecution of male homosexuals is well documented and they still suffer
discrimination, stigma, harassment and violence at the hands of covert
homophobics as well as attacks from overtly homophobic thugs. Lesbianism
has never been a crime in Britain although attempts have been made to
make it so. They do however experience discrimination and ridicule even
if they have been spared prosecution.

Why are the religions so against homosexuality? Because it challenges
their belief that marriage, ordained by god and controlled by the
church, is the only institution in which to raise children and denial of
the equal status of men and women.

1) Marriage, consecrated only by the church was the only way for
god-fearing people to have children. It further reinforced this by
ensuring that marriage could only be legal if carried out by a priest.
To have children outside marriage meant punishment, stigma and social
rejection and poverty. This gave them enormous power over people's
lives, and especially women's lives.

2) A sexual relationship between two men or two women challenges
their ideology that sexual relationships are only be acceptable for
procreation and therefore between a man and a woman.

3) A two man partnership challenges the notion that there should be a
superior and inferior partner. A man and a woman. That a man somehow
takes on a woman's role within a partnership demeans men's preordained
superior role within the family, in their eyes.

4) That two women can create as good a partnership as one without a
man is inconceivable to sexists. A two woman partnership challenges the
notion that there must be a male partner for it to 'work'.

Religion's grip has gradually been loosened by the demands of a more
rational liberal and humanitarian population, and the evils of guilt and
fear, prejudice and discrimination against homosexuals, same sex
couples, unmarried mothers and children born out of wedlock are rapidly
becoming a thing of the past.

The process is not yet complete, and as with any radical social
change (and it has been a rapid change) it will take time for the laws
and institutions created under the restrictive doctrines of the past to
adjust to the new freedoms that people can achieved in a secular state.

Women
and Violence

Women and Violence

Institutionalised violence is frequently practised against women.
Until recent times, a man was allowed to chastise his wife 'within
limits', and until a matter of a few years ago, attacks on women in the
home however severe, were treated as 'domestic violence' and not
considered cause for police intervention. The use of this euphemism and
the stigma attached to women who 'allowed themselves' to be beaten, or
'deserved' ill treatment, served to hide a whole world of abuse of women
by their husbands or partners. The amount of such abuse must have been
well known to Catholic priests who were in the habit of hearing
confessions!

Although there were refuges for women in the 19th century, only in
the 1970s did the opening of refuges to which battered women could flee
become widespread. The assertive action of the feminists who exposed the
extent of this violence towards women, gradually led society to
challenge the age old acceptance of wife beating. Public and police
eventually came face to face with domestic violence and deemed it
unacceptable.

The Christian religion has a long history of oppression of women.
Women bore the brunt of the superstition, misogyny, throughout the
Catholic Inquisition in Europe, and the puritan fanaticism in the 15th
and 16th centuries, when many were hunted down as 'witches'. They were
persecuted, imprisoned and hanged for being possessed by the devil, old
women and a few children and men were hounded by the 'Great Witch
finders' most notably in Cambridgeshire and East Anglia, events that
have since been well chronicled. A pattern that was to be repeated in
Salem village, US, now well known from Arthur Miller's play 'The
Crucible'.

Within living memory women were punished for sexual misdemeanours,
their children taken away and they themselves put into institutions for
the mentally ill for 'moral turpitude'. Many of these cases came to
light in the mass closure of mental institutions in the 1980s by the
Thatcher government. Action that threw thousands of institutionalised
men and women onto the streets and into bed and breakfast accommodation,
euphemistically called 'care in the community'.

In the 'Magdalen* Laundries' of Ireland women and young girls who
became pregnant out of wedlock were harshly treated by the women of the
church of Rome, the 'Brides of Christ'. Their babies were taken away
from them and they were stigmatised if word got out that they had
'illegitimate' babies. Only now are we becoming fully aware of the
excessive cruelty, mental, physical and sexual abuse inflicted on
vulnerable children, and young adults at the hands of priests and nuns
in these institutions, Industrial Schools and Convent schools. Orphans
and abandoned children, children with physical or mental disabilities in
need of care found themselves in 'homes' that were far from home like,
treated with great cruelty by the 'fathers', 'brothers', 'mothers' and
'sisters' of the church.

Amazingly these institutions existed well into the 1960s. Such is the
control exerted by the religions over their believers that only now are
the excesses of their systems of harsh religious control coming to light
as is the even more widespread extent of child sex abuse by priests in
Europe and the US.

But it is Islam that currently outrages civilised peoples with its
harsh and cruel punishments for sexual 'crimes', and insubordination.
Women have been stoned for adultery, their word is not recognised in
courts of law, if they dare bring charges of rape they risk being
accused and punished for adultery themselves. Women are still being made
to marry against their will, and if they marry against the wishes of
their fathers or brothers, they can be banished from the family into
destitution, attacked and mutilated and even killed by their male
relatives.

Women's
Freedom

Women's Freedom

Women's freedom of movement has always depended upon her position in
society and relative to her dependence upon her male relatives. Her
presence in public has always been constrained by her role as secondary
to a man. Even today many women would feel out of place in some public
places without a male escort. And many men still see a lone woman in
public as signalling her availability if not actually inviting their
sexual attentions.

There are still clubs and institutions that bar women, with or
without a male escort, The Freemasons, 'gentlemen's' clubs and golf
clubs and the MCC still discriminate against women, not on the grounds
that they do not have a relevant interest in the activities or services
offered, but only because they are not male.

In many Muslim countries women still do not feel safe to go out in
public without wearing the Burka for fear of 'inflaming men's lust', or
even not allowed out in public without permission of a male relative,
and are not allowed to drive. The dowry system puts pressure on women
and is a form of payment.

Lest we are tempted to smugness, it is only a matter of decades since
British women had to give up paid work outside the home on marriage,
could not raise a mortgage or borrow money from a bank in their own
right. Women could not enter university, or vote, and until the Married
Woman's Property Act in 1882, which allowed married women to keep all
personal and real property acquired before and during marriage, all
their property became the property of their husband on marriage.

Women
and the Family

Women and the Family

It is in this arena that health and contraception, punitive
attitudes, notions of inequality and the subservient role of women,
restrictions on employment and freedom come together.

Religious strictures on divorce still keep many Jewish and Catholic
women and all women where divorce laws are dictated by these religions
in unhappy marriages.

The 'Woman
on a Pedestal' and 'Statutory Woman'

The 'Woman
on a Pedestal' and 'Statutory Woman'

Women throughout history have been sidelined, their role to service
men, regarded as possessions to be bought and sold, to entertain and
produce male heirs. Except the very few who have been elevated to
symbolic male status - as an icon. In this syndrome, a woman, by birth,
by chance, by personality, ability or ambition, are placed at the top of
often the most overtly sexist organisations, and political parties so
that those organisations can say "There you are, we have a woman at
the top so we cannot be sexist".

The religions have their icons, saints and above all the virgin
herself. All male dominated societies in which women are suppressed have
their female icons, Queen, Princess or President. Countries,
corporations, families in which women are treated as second class, will
sport a 'top' woman.

Every male organisation, corporation, government will also have its 'statutory
woman' in order to be able to say that it is not all male. Such
women are carefully chosen, they are often not people who fight for
equality. They are encouraged to assume that they are there by right or
just deserts, and they may indeed be talented women, they do not however
appear to realise that they are being used at least in part to maintain
the subservient role of their sisters. Unfortunately they are usually
keen to ensure that they stay firmly on their pedestal, it confirms to
them the very understandable pleasure of seeing themselves as 'special'
or even as representative of all women.

Part 2 of this site is an interim
discussion and definitions -CLICKLnks

Part 3 is a personal audit of the
gender balance in the Secular Humanist movementNot currently
available